Robotic Process Automation is capable of enhancing routines at any company, naturally eliminating inefficiencies and risks overtime. This type of automation absorbs activities that don’t require human decision-making, including issues that can be solved through simple and straight-forward activities based on rules. It can trigger responses, distribute information, and input data precisely and without errors or mistakes. Wondering if this is a good thing? Let’s take a deeper look and find out more about robotic process automation in corporate scenarios.
In this post you will learn about:
- What is Robotic Process Automation in a nutshell?
- How RPA works?
- What can Robotic Process Automation do?
- Eliminating inefficiencies with RPA
- When automation should it be used?
- How can automation strategies be created?
- Auditing process automation
What is Robotic Process Automation in a nutshell?
Robotic Process Automation is a term used to describe automated software programs that perform “digital” activities. They take over repetitive tasks based on business rules so that people can focus on decision-making issues. RPA can also collect data from various sources, like websites and applications, to populate or initiate other types of software and systems.
How RPA works?
RPA is not an actual robot, but is software that accesses data from IT systems. It can integrate with applications, transfer data, connect to databases or access web services at the back-end of your process. Basically, it automates repetitive digital interactions as if it were a human clicking through and entering information into software; it can open e-mail attachments, fill out e-forms, record data and execute other tedious tasks that do not require judgement or thinking.
What can Robotic Process Automation do?
It depends on your company’s market practices and daily routines, but in general, this type of automation touches on the topics below:
- Create repetitive tasks
- Capture Content
- Structure Data
- Brows through web systems
- Integration with different systems
- Send and receive e-mails
- Supply various softwares with data
- Streamline auditing processes
Eliminating inefficiencies with RPA
It’s important to keep in mind that these automated features simply streamline manual human tasks. This means that automation will merely automate a process, even if it is already inefficient. So the real inefficiency lies within process activities and how they are structured to provide added value to the system. Here are some cases where automation can be beneficial to your business:
Integration across legacy systems: old systems that carry out billing processes are hard to change, so automation can be used to create layers of interactions between old and new environments.
Customer experience: chatbots, for example, can streamline initial customer services processes, capturing basic data for assignment to the appropriate team.
Compliance control and assessment: business rules are key to maintaining quality across systems. This lowers the risks caused by people not paying attention. Automation consistently assures compliance across all activities.
Governance features: constant system monitoring can inform managers and coordinators ahead of time about deviations in results, making it easier to initiate corrective action plans.
Even though robotic process automation has its limitations, it is sure to play a crucial role in eliminating inefficiencies. Once you understand where your company is able to automate, you can evaluate data collected to gain insights into the flaws or risks in your system.
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When automation should it be used?
RPA is most often used to personalize the user experience and take control of recurring tasks. Once companies fall into a certain tier of service, they can generate an overwhelming flow of data. This means that teams are being overloaded by minor tasks. So once you notice this issue, it is time to start looking for an business process management solution that uses automation.
Nevertheless, some processes may still need human intervention for decision-making, reasoning and judgment. Assess the business processes that have the biggest impact on your costs and the ones where there are the most consumer interactions. Next, look at where humans need to interact to think and make decisions that matter to the issue. This will allow you to implement RPA in a targeted way in those places that are most prone to recurring decisions and answers.
How can automation strategies be created?
Creating business rules is one thing, but automating companies is an everchanging challenge in the market. Automation may work in one department, while in the next it might not. So how can we manage these issues across the company? First, you must understand how RPA impacts the tiers of your company:
Once you cover every topic that must be addressed first, talk with managers so they can run down the issues that naturally impact and influence each of their routines. Drill down into the details of problems and uncertainties to create additional improvement projects and assign them to specialists.
Auditing process automation
Corporate auditing has been a major issue in recent years with the growth of the digital market. Companies are having to incorporate new technologies into their processes to stay competitive. Unfortunately, this creates new chores that need to be assigned to employees. Yet up to a certain level, you can escalate some tasks to an RPA for advance processing of audit controls.
These tasks often consume a lot of people’s time. So executing them with automation is a great solution. Business rules are the main road that lead these automations along the safe path of auditing. To further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of audit practices, companies need to rethink their assessments using micro-automations in their departments, including:
Data capture: search and capture data to initiate more complex decision-making processes.
Content standardization: ensure that information entered in processes is valid and in accordance with company standards.
Data cleaning: automatically search databases to identify and clean records with errors and flaws.
Record validation: in the capture phase, verify fields and records according to content standardization.
Conclusion
Automation is still incapable of professional judgement. So for now, its role is to perform repetitive, rule-based and time-consuming activities.
The idea is to use these features to improve the experience and expertise of those involved. Therefore, to maximize the benefits of technology in processes, it is not only crucial to implement automation of certain tasks, but also to know how to coordinate the evolution of activities in an automated landscape so that people can have more time to gain insights to further improve systems.
